Chapter 42
Chapter forty-two
Six Months Later
Ellis held a toothbrush like evidence.
“This is the third one you’ve left here.” He dangled it between us in the bathroom mirror. The green one, the one I swore I was taking home months ago. “You’ve been sleeping here twenty-six of the last thirty nights.”
I was brushing my teeth, which made defensiveness impossible.
He leaned against the counter. Water dripped from his hair. He wore boxers and a soft expression that suited him. The soft version was the real version, and the armor was an act.
“You basically live here. Jack has made friends. That plant on the shelf? Diane’s doing. You introduced them.”
I spat into the sink. “Where are you going with this, Ellis?”
“I’m going with this: move in with me.”
The words hovered in the bathroom air, casual as anything, like he hadn’t just asked me to uproot again, to choose, to commit to something permanent and terrifying.
“That’s…”
“I was waiting for you to say the word.” He met my eyes in the mirror.
“What word?”
“Permanently.”
He waited. Both versions, the one in the mirror and the flesh-and-blood one beside me, stood in this bathroom asking me to stay.
I turned to face him. “Yes, but not here. Not my place either. Somewhere ours. I want your ridiculous plant collection and your alarm that goes off at five-thirty even on weekends. I want the chaos of us, your socks and geometric everything and your need to organize my life. Forever. I want it forever.”
He smiled. The smile that came from really being seen, from someone choosing you all over again because they wanted to, not because they were lost or scared or running.
“Okay.” He said it like it was the easiest thing. “Somewhere ours.”
We found the Clinton Hill apartment by accident, or that’s what I told myself.
Ellis probably found it online three days before he suggested we “walk the neighborhood.” It was perfect.
High ceilings. Original hardwood. A kitchen with actual counter space.
Two bedrooms, one for plants. Ellis’ plant room, which he’d call his “botanical office” and which would eventually house seventeen plants in various states of thriving.
Moving day unleashed chaos. Sierra and Lauren showed up with boxes and a friendship that needed no explanation.
Calliope arrived with sage and protection crystals, which she placed in every corner while Ellis sneezed for approximately forty minutes.
Raven brought a tarot deck and explanations about the Significator and what it meant to have multiple versions of yourself in the reading.
Ellis listened like it was the most important information he’d ever heard.
My mom came with Tupperware full of comida. She watched Ellis stack boxes, corrected his grip on the heavier ones, and watched him reorganize the kitchen without being asked. When she saw him place spices in alphabetical order, her face softened. “He’s tidy.”
“He’s obsessive,” I countered.
“You should keep him.”
Linda and Greg arrived in the afternoon with wine and a housewarming gift. Some expensive serving platter that will sit in a cabinet because we’re not people who serve on platters. Greg did a one-armed hug thing that might be his love language.
“Nice place.” Greg looked around. “Good bones.” His father nodded, and something settled between them, something that wasn’t settled before.
Linda reorganized the Tupperware containers without asking. My mom caught it, and they exchanged a look that might have been the beginning of something.
In the kitchen, my mother taught Ellis to make sofrito.
She put her pilón, her favorite wooden mortar, on the counter that she’d brought from home.
She said the wood remembered every hand that had ever used it, all the way back to her own mother, and that recipes from jars weren’t recipes at all.
She didn’t trust me with it. She’d tried twice when I was a teenager.
Both times I’d cracked the surface, and we’d had a long conversation about respect.
Tonight, she set it in front of Ellis almost as if she were handing him something on loan.
“Ajo,” she said, and slid a head of garlic toward him. “Hands.”
“Hands?”
“You’ll see.”
She demonstrated. Smashed two cloves against the wood with the pestle, three quick strikes, then added a pinch of oregano and a piece of bell pepper and worked the wood in a rolling motion that came from somewhere older than her.
Ellis watched. His face was complete concentration.
I’d seen that expression every time he was learning a system from the inside out, every variable getting indexed, his careful brain trying to translate body knowledge into something he could replicate.
She handed him the pestle. He took it the way you’d take a baby. She laughed at him, the surprise of her actual laugh, the one she only let out around her sisters and her best friend Luz on Sunday afternoons.
“It’s not glass, mijo. Hit it like you mean it.”
He tried. The pestle came down too soft. The garlic didn’t yield.
“Again. With the shoulder, not the wrist.”
He tried again. Better. She watched.
“Like that. Now turn it. The whole way around. Don’t be afraid to crush it. The garlic wants to become something. You’re helping it.”
He turned the pestle. His shoulder came down into it the way she’d shown him. A clove split open and sent its smell up between them. She nodded, just once, and he caught it and turned the pestle again.
“Cilantro.” She tapped the bunch on the cutting board. “Tear it. Don’t cut it. Knife bruises the leaves.”
He tore.
She stood very still and watched the next two motions of his shoulder. Then her hand came up. Landed on his forearm. Firm. The way she touched things that mattered. She corrected his angle by a degree. He adjusted under her palm.
“Good,” she said. Quiet. As though she’d just admitted something to herself she hadn’t planned to admit out loud.
She patted his arm. Once. Reflexive. A touch that escaped before her brain could second-guess it.
Ellis caught my eye over her head. His eyes glistened. He didn’t say anything because he knew what was happening, and he knew that naming it would break it. He just kept turning the pestle. Let the garlic and the herbs become what they were going to become under her watch.
I leaned against the doorframe of our new kitchen, and the floor went quiet under me. My mother’s hand was on the man I loved. She was teaching him the base of every meal she’d ever made for me. She was here. She had brought the pilón.
“Mijo.” She didn’t look up. “Get him a glass of water. He’s going to need both hands for this part.”
I got him a glass of water. Set it on the counter beside the pilón. Backed out of the kitchen because they didn’t need me in there. Stood in the hallway listening to her instruct him in Spanish phrases she didn’t translate, and to him repeating them back the way you’d learn a hymn.
When the sofrito was ready, she served it to everyone.
Calliope was first because she looked the hungriest. Sierra and Lauren next.
Raven, who’d materialized in the doorway with her tarot deck already shuffled.
Linda and Greg, who hesitated until my mother pointed at the chairs and said, “Sit.” Linda sat.
She set the last plate in front of Ellis. Heavier than the others, the way she’d always made my plate heavier than my cousins’ at family dinners.
She didn’t sit down. She stood at the counter with her hands on the back of a chair and watched the room eat. Watched Ellis dig in, take the first bite, close his eyes for half a second because the food was that good, and he was the kind of person who paused for things like that.
She didn’t take any for herself. She just watched.
That was how I knew she’d accepted him.
That night, after our parents left, and the boxes stacked in corners, The Chaos Coven stayed for our first official movie night. We abandoned the couch, only using it as a backrest, and all piled on the floor together. The floor was the venue.
Sierra and Lauren leaned against the front of the couch, Lauren’s head on Sierra’s shoulder, a shared bowl of popcorn balanced on Sierra’s knee.
To Calliope it was a spiritual experience because she went cross-legged on a cushion.
Raven mimicked a cat claiming territory by sprawling lengthwise across the floor, laying on all three couch cushions, because Raven did what Raven wanted.
Ellis ended up tucked against my side on the floor. His arm came around my waist without thinking. His head tilted toward mine. His warmth settled into my side like it belonged there, and it did belong there.
This was the thing I’d feared. Two worlds colliding, the chaos of my life meeting the order of his, the people I loved meeting the person I loved. Instead of a collision, there was a fit. Ellis fit.
After everyone left, the apartment settled into a quiet that felt earned. Kitchen. Hips against the counter. His hands on my waist.
“I’m happy,” I said. “Not manic, not running, not performing. Just content.”
He turned me to face him. His hands warmed my ribs. “That’s the best kind.”
“A year ago, I would have called this settling.”
“And now?”
“Now I call it choosing.”
We kissed in the kitchen of our apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn buzzing outside the windows. Somewhere in the chaos of boxes and new spaces, Jack watched from a corner, growing steadily.
It sounded like home.
By the time the last guest left, the apartment smelled like leftover dinner, Calliope’s sage, and the cardboard tang of broken-down boxes stacked by the door.
Ellis flicked the kitchen light off, and the radiator clanked once, settling.
The bedroom didn’t have the bed frame yet.
The mattress sat on the floor under the window in a square of streetlight.
“We need to get a frame.”
“I told you Saturday.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“It’s past Saturday.”
We stood in the doorway and stared at the mattress like it was a puzzle. He took my hand. Pulled me in.